Individual achievement is the focus: Students spend a bulk of their time focusing on improving their GPAs — school is a competition among peers. “But innovation is a team sport,” says Wagner. “Yes, it requires some solitude and reflection, but fundamentally problems are too complex to innovate or solve by oneself.” Student Loans: A Long Journey Of Confusion That Ends In Owe, Owe, Owe Sheryl Nance-Nash Contributor The Perfect Marketing Strategy For Soap, Soda, And Startups Brian Clark Contributor

Specialization is celebrated and rewarded: High school curriculum is structured using Carnegie units, a system that is 125 years old, says Wagner. He says the director of talent at Google once told him, “If there’s one thing that educators need to understand, it’s that you can neither understand nor solve problems within the context and bright lines of subject content.” Wagner declares, “Learning to be an innovator is about learning to cross disciplinary boundaries and exploring problems and their solutions from multiple perspectives.”

Risk aversion is the norm: “We penalize mistakes,” says Wagner. “The whole challenge in schooling is to figure out what the teacher wants. And the teachers have to figure out what the superintendent wants or the state wants. It’s a compliance-driven, risk-averse culture.” Innovation, on the other hand, is grounded in taking risks and learning via trial and error. Educators could take a note from design firm IDEO with its mantra of “Fail early, fail often,” says Wagner. And at Stanford’s Institute of Design, he says they are considering ideas like, “We’re thinking F is the new A.” Without failure, there is no innovation.

Learning is profoundly passive: For 12 to 16 years, we learn to consume information while in school, says Wagner. He suspects that our schooling culture has actually turned us into the “good little consumers” that we are. Innovative learning cultures teach about creating, not consuming, he says.

Extrinsic incentives drive learning: “Carrots and sticks, As and Fs,” Wagner remarks. Young innovators are intrinsically motivated, he says. They aren’t interested in grading scales and petty reward systems. Parents and teachers can encourage innovative thinking by nurturing the curiosity and inquisitiveness of young people, Wagner says. As he describes it, it’s a pattern of “play to passion to purpose.” Parents of innovators encouraged their children to play in more exploratory ways, he says. “Fewer toys, more toys without batteries, more unstructured time in their day.” Those children grow up to find passions, not just academic achievement, he says. “And that passion matures to a profound sense of purpose. Every young person I interviewed wants to make a difference in the world, put a ding in the universe.”

The band has derived their success — and scorn — by turning contemporary punk culture on its head. Where punk was once relegated to musky basements, squats, and other shabby makeshift venues, Pussy Riot makes all public spaces — the streets, the metro, the church — their stage. While punk bands play for punks, Pussy Riot plays for commuters, police, and clergy. While punk bands seek fame with glamorous pseudonyms and outlandish rockstar antics, Pussy Riot is masked. While punk bands engage in nihilistic lyricism, Pussy Riot’s songs are direct attacks on the confines of their authoritarian state and patriarchy. Since punk fell from the pop charts in the early 80s, it has been sent on a quest to define and sustain its own identity, creating punk houses, venues, record stores, and community centers, resulting in the introverted and self-obsessed situation of the sub-genre today. Pussy Riot does precisely the opposite. (via Pussy Riot’s U.S. Tour? – The New Inquiry)

In the video above, each blue column represents an instrument, and each block in a column represents an individual phrase. When one phrase finishes playing, it randomly cues up and plays another one. This is kind of like having five or six separate copies of iTunes, each playing independently – one on drums, another one bass, another one on chords, and so on – and all of them playing on shuffle, independent of one another. It’s a brilliant head-melter to try and write simple harmony for. Also, I can now trigger images in sync, in the other windows there. Been messing around trying to think about how live notation might work.

Adaptive/recursive design

This is a more flexible way to compose, listen to, and maybe perform this stuff, but I want to keep sharing sketches with my friends, and don’t want to force anyone to have to run a custom Max patch just to listen to some crappy demo. So, the shuffleable MP3s of this sketch are stamped with the specific time when I recorded them playing on the fancier software-based setup. (via Music For Shuffle Sketch #10) Click through to download the shuffleable MP3s.

“I took my old record player and decided to use it in my work before I throw it away. I put a reproduction of an old masters paintings and super heroes dolls on it and take pictures in a variable speeds.

The low-tech record player connect and mix between iconics masters painting and digital contemporary photography to Create new representation.”

Today, your washing machine is almost certainly controlled by a computer that could be programmed to do astrophysics or word processing instead, if it were given suitable input-output devices and enough memory to hold the necessary data.